Daily Papers

This paper presents a Discriminative Deep Dyna-Q (D3Q) approach to improving the effectiveness and robustness of Deep Dyna-Q (DDQ), a recently proposed framework that extends the Dyna-Q algorithm to integrate planning for task-completion dialogue policy learning. To obviate DDQ's high dependency on the quality of simulated experiences, we incorporate an RNN-based discriminator in D3Q to differentiate simulated experience from real user experience in order to control the quality of training data. Experiments show that D3Q significantly outperforms DDQ by controlling the quality of simulated experience used for planning. The effectiveness and robustness of D3Q is further demonstrated in a domain extension setting, where the agent's capability of adapting to a changing environment is tested.

Reasoning models have recently shown remarkable progress in domains such as math and coding. However, their expert-level abilities in math and coding contrast sharply with their performance in long-horizon, interactive tasks such as web navigation and computer/phone-use. Inspired by literature on human cognition, we argue that current AI agents need ''vicarious trial and error'' - the capacity to mentally simulate alternative futures before acting - in order to enhance their understanding and performance in complex interactive environments. We introduce Dyna-Mind, a two-stage training framework that explicitly teaches (V)LM agents to integrate such simulation into their reasoning. In stage 1, we introduce Reasoning with Simulations (ReSim), which trains the agent to generate structured reasoning traces from expanded search trees built from real experience gathered through environment interactions. ReSim thus grounds the agent's reasoning in faithful world dynamics and equips it with the ability to anticipate future states in its reasoning. In stage 2, we propose Dyna-GRPO, an online reinforcement learning method to further strengthen the agent's simulation and decision-making ability by using both outcome rewards and intermediate states as feedback from real rollouts. Experiments on two synthetic benchmarks (Sokoban and ALFWorld) and one realistic benchmark (AndroidWorld) demonstrate that (1) ReSim effectively infuses simulation ability into AI agents, and (2) Dyna-GRPO leverages outcome and interaction-level signals to learn better policies for long-horizon, planning-intensive tasks. Together, these results highlight the central role of simulation in enabling AI agents to reason, plan, and act more effectively in the ever more challenging environments.

We introduce X-Dyna, a novel zero-shot, diffusion-based pipeline for animating a single human image using facial expressions and body movements derived from a driving video, that generates realistic, context-aware dynamics for both the subject and the surrounding environment. Building on prior approaches centered on human pose control, X-Dyna addresses key shortcomings causing the loss of dynamic details, enhancing the lifelike qualities of human video animations. At the core of our approach is the Dynamics-Adapter, a lightweight module that effectively integrates reference appearance context into the spatial attentions of the diffusion backbone while preserving the capacity of motion modules in synthesizing fluid and intricate dynamic details. Beyond body pose control, we connect a local control module with our model to capture identity-disentangled facial expressions, facilitating accurate expression transfer for enhanced realism in animated scenes. Together, these components form a unified framework capable of learning physical human motion and natural scene dynamics from a diverse blend of human and scene videos. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that X-Dyna outperforms state-of-the-art methods, creating highly lifelike and expressive animations. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/X-Dyna.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has been a subject of intense study in recent years, because of its applications in robotics and autonomous driving. Much of the recent work focuses on improving depth estimation by increasing architecture complexity. This paper shows that state-of-the-art performance can also be achieved by improving the learning process rather than increasing model complexity. More specifically, we propose (i) disregarding small potentially dynamic objects when training, and (ii) employing an appearance-based approach to separately estimate object pose for truly dynamic objects. We demonstrate that these simplifications reduce GPU memory usage by 29% and result in qualitatively and quantitatively improved depth maps. The code is available at https://github.com/kieran514/Dyna-DM.

Recent studies have shown that carefully designed workflows coordinating large language models(LLMs) significantly enhance task-solving capabilities compared to using a single model. While an increasing number of works focus on autonomous workflow construction, most existing approaches rely solely on historical experience, leading to limitations in efficiency and adaptability. We argue that while historical experience is valuable, workflow construction should also flexibly respond to the unique characteristics of each task. To this end, we propose an a priori dynamic framework for automated workflow construction. Our framework first leverages Q-table learning to optimize the decision space, guiding agent decisions and enabling effective use of historical experience. At the same time, agents evaluate the current task progress and make a priori decisions regarding the next executing agent, allowing the system to proactively select the more suitable workflow structure for each given task. Additionally, we incorporate mechanisms such as cold-start initialization, early stopping, and pruning to further improve system efficiency. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our method achieves an average improvement of 4.05%, while reducing workflow construction and inference costs to only 30.68%-48.31% of those required by existing methods.